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Tuesday, January 28, 2014

`Untouchable Probity and Distilled Power'

“That
this conservative tendency has become so rare nowadays that it is again almost avant garde is an interesting fact in
itself.”

A
conservative conserves what is
best in his cultural inheritance. He prizes originality and subversion less
than artful recrafting of the given. To do otherwise is to scorn one’s
teachers. Like Bob Dylan, who can’t sing eight bars without footnoting Muddy
Waters or Hank Williams, a writer of conservative bent moves his pen with the assistance
of useful forebears, all the good writers who’ve taught him a lesson. In this
sense, as Michael Oakeshott reminds us, to be conservative is “to prefer the tried
to the untried” and “present laughter to utopian bliss.”The passage quoted at
the top is drawn from Louise Bogan’s 1944 review of The Giant Weapon, a collection of thirty-three poems written by
Yvor Winters in the fifteen years since he moved from Imagism to poetry of
meter and rhyme. Strictly as professionals, without the disabilities of
politics or romance, Bogan and Winters were mutually admiring of the other’s
poems. This is from Bogan’s review, collected in Selected Criticism: Prose, Poetry (1955) and A Poet’s Alphabet (1970):

“This
poetry’s light, undercutting observation, its tenderness, which keeps it on the
side of life and joy even when it seems most grave, its total avoidance of
cliché, its lack of sentimentality, its deep interest in themes of truth and
justice—these elements separate it completely from dead formality and
generalized emptiness.”

Bogan’s
reading of Winters is remarkable for its independence of critical thought. Who else sees
the enormous tenderness in his poems? Or their endorsement of “life and joy?”
And “generalized emptiness” is a marvelous indictment of much that is worst in
fashionable writing of any sort, in any age. Bogan singles out a poem Winters wrote in 1942, after the
start of World War II, titled “To a Military Rifle.” Elsewhere, Auden described
it as “very fine” and Helen Pinkerton judged it, among Winters’ poems inspired
by World War II, as “probably the finest, with its indictment of the lust for
power.”You’ll
find it in The Selected Poems of Yvor
Winters (ed. R.L. Barth, Ohio University Press/Swallow Press, 1999). Here
are the opening lines:

“The
times come round again;

The
private life is small;

And
individual men

Are
counted not at all.

Now
life is general,

And
the bewildered Muse,

Thinking
what she has done,

Confronts
the daily news.”

And
here, at the conclusion of her review, is Bogan’s assessment:

“[The
poem] turns out to be one of the fine poems produced by the war. It is as far
removed from ordinary war verse as a poem can possibly be and still deal with
its subject. That Winters should have written this poem, which is a poem of the
future, that he should continue to exist at all, that he should have persisted
in his way of writing until the turn of the wheel brought him back as
modern—these facts should delight us. They are proof that as a people we can
produce untouchable probity and distilled power in the most unlikely times.”